Luthier Pooh is back at it again. This time we fix those vintage saddle screws that keep stabbing your hand. 
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I changed some plastics on one of my guitars. I think it looks better. 
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I would strongly advise against anything but a full pocket neck shim because the downward force over a partial shim will start to warp the end of the neck. This can lead to strings fretting out and a neck in need of refinishing and refretting. This is why Fender stopped doing this. A partial shim also kills sustain. Hence the age old “Gibsons have more sustain than Fenders.”
If you don’t feel like making an angled shim. StewMac sells them.
I agree with what you’re saying for the most part. But this bass guitar neck in your link is an extreme example of shimming right against the body in the pocket. I made my shims so the lip is actually underneath the rear screws.
At the time, I wanted a cheap, quick fix for those guitar setups. I just chose to shoot videos doing it. Thinking about it now, those weren’t the best videos to make.
The problem with stew macs is you don’t really know which degree you need. And isn’t a 3 pack 50 bucks? That’s highway robbery man.
What I’m going to do eventually is any of the guitars I’m keeping, out of the ones I shimmed; I’m going to go back and stewmac shim them.
I’m all about paper shims. Video below demonstrates the concept using masking tape, but I usually use 3x5 cards cut to the length of the neck pocket (minus a buffer around the perimiter to avoid binding against the sides of the pocket) and equal fractions of the neck pocket length, (number of subdivisions depending on how much slope I need). The end result is like a little paper flight of stairs, with one layer of paper for each “step”; two equal steps (a half neckpocket length on top of a whole neckpocket length) equals the smallest slope. Three equal steps is the next steepest. Etc. etc. If you ever needed to, you could use thinner paper instead of typical card stock.
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Yeah man, Similar to the tape method you shared, I’ve had several repair guys tell me they use aluminum foil. Folded in layers to emulate a wedge. I could have spent more time on the foil job I did and made a full pocket shaped shim. You can’t tell me that a stepped up aluminum foil wedge is going to warp a neck. The surface pressure mashes the wedged foil to a even more perfectly wedged shim when you bolt the neck on.
Unfortunately they have this forum setup where you can’t delete a post after it’s been up a month or so now. So I can’t remove the old shim videos from here. I’ll do a Stewmac shim video, then link the old videos to the Stewmac… I guess. To hell with neck shimming. Agitating subject. 
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Here’s my hillbilly Floyd Rose setup.
I’d really want to see that same straightedge test done on the fretboard side of the neck before I’d come to that same conclusion. To me, the fat more plausible conclusion would be that over time the shim slightly compressed the wood at the base of the neck heel, rather than the whole neck was bent at the very tip of the heel. It’s pretty easy to compress wood, even a fairly hard wood like maple, over time. It’s EXTREMELY hard to bend it.
Also, I’ve heard as many people argue for isolating the neck from the body to improve sustain, as I have heard argue that a shim kills sustain. Some of them are just crazy enough to maybe be taken seriously - Eric Johnson, for example, if I remember right, is an advocate of nylon shims to isolate neck and body vibrations anywhere except for through the strings, and he takes tone more seriously than anyone else I can think of.
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I’m with you on the neck shim warp theories Drew. I think if you shim up to the bottom 2 neck bolts… There is no way for the neck to warp. The warping comes from the narrow shims that are placed right on the bottom of the pocket leaving a huge gap between the thin shim and the bottom neck screws.
I have Stew Mac shims now though… I will be re-shimming and updating my shim videos as soon as I get around to rotating those guitars out of storage again. I use 1 or 2 guitars at a time… keep the rest in storage. I rotate guitars on the re-strings. That keeps most of them safe from theft… and it makes maintenance easier. I don’t have 10 guitars sitting around with half carroded strings that way.
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I’d be curious if you hear any tonal/sustain differences, Hanky. I’ve personally never noticed anything on an unshimmed vs shimmed neck (aside from the improvement in playability, if a shim was necessary) but it’s been a long time since I’ve taken a guitar with no shim and shimmed it, so who knows.
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That would be a good video idea right there Drew… The shim video, with before and after tonality.
I think a lot of that stuff effects the guitar tone/sustain a little… a lot of this stuff is so little you can’t tell unless you are playing the guitar I think. I started doing a secret neck pocket trick to my guitars to improve the sustain and string vibration transfer through the body. Is it a huge difference? No. Do I feel the difference playing it. Yeah. You notice these things the most playing it unplugged and listening to it acoustically. My best sounding guitar is loud unplugged… and the guitar body vibrates my ribs when I’m playing it.
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Against advise to use shellac and wax, I spot repaired this poly finished guitar neck with satin polyurethane. So far so good.
And here is the last step after the poly dried.
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These repair videos are cool, but we’ve decided against having compilation threads of people’s stuff. I understand we didn’t have our thoughts sorted out on this when we started - we’re learning as we go here.
We’ve had a bunch of conversations on this topic in various threads over the past few weeks, and it has helped us put together some more specific guidelines about forum members linking to their own creations. They’re up in the forum guidelines over here:
https://troygrady.com/policies/forum/
A work in progress, feedback welcome. Here’s the discussion on that:
https://forum.troygrady.com/t/new-cracking-the-code-forum-guidelines/
Thank you!
I didn’t intend on this being a compilation of my stuff. I started this thread for people to share any DIY repair videos. I guess I am the only one sharing repair work.
So do you want me to stop posting here?
I figured. I think people probably didn’t get the hint.
@Tommo asked recently whether we want to have something similar for cover tunes, i.e. general place where people can just post stuff they did. I’m not necessarily against any of these things if it’s something everyone wants. But I am against mega-threads because it’s hard to find stuff inside them. If anything, I’d vote for single-topic threads with titles that are more specific and easily searchable.
In this case I’d say yes, for now, hold off here. If we end up with a “post your repairs” type of section then sure. But I would open that up for discussion in Site Feedback.
Wow guys, this place has gotten pretty lame. I was hearing about the hard time you gave Jilly Marchbank recently, for sharing a short YouTube video?
Facebook groups are “where it’s at” these days. It’s not a setup where one person has control of the whole platform that you are on. These independent forums have became a place to corral your customers… keep a close leash on them. Keep them focused on the product you are selling… Hell, why let anyone post something that isn’t catering to your ego or wallet right?
I’m outta here bro.
No need to “hear” about anything - it’s all right here on the forum. Pasting the same YouTube link on a handful of resurrected threads is not really “conversation”, we discussed that, and we’re all square on that now. If they think I’ve given them a hard time they’re more than welcome to say so - they have my email and I have theirs. Instead I think we’d all be much more excited to talk about some nice 240fps Magnet footage. All they gotta do is load it up and hit record.
More generally we always attempt to be super open about everything around here. Anything we’re talking about doing or not doing is out in the open on the threads. Were coming up on a year here. I’ve never deleted one of my own posts, and I rarely use private messaging except to defuse forum scuffles.
This ain’t a democracy for sure and nobody ever said it was. But I feel like most everyone here means well and likes to be here and we can’t ask for more than that.
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I personally like Cracking the Code for what it is, a revolutionary method for learning guitar technique with real proof on the thesis proposed.
Everything else has already tons of places on the web to look at.
If it were more of the same many of us wouldn’t be buying.
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